Ostapenko’s veiled comment sparked a wildfire of press speculation — our own included. Only now are cooler heads joining the conversation. Their consensus: that there’s no technical reason Russia can’t match America’s robot space plane. But a lack of political will, supporting infrastructure and cash make a Russian “X-37ski” an unlikely prospect.

The basic technology for a reusable space plane is half a century old, according to space expert Jim Oberg. “The Russians have experimented with lifting body spacecraft since the 1960s and have even flown orbital prototypes.”

At the hardware level, “there are no obvious roadblocks,” Oberg said. But that’s not the only level.

Oberg pointed out that the Dreamchaser, one of the many in-development U.S. space planes meant to eventually join the X-37 in low orbit, might in fact be indirectly based on the Russian MiG-105 from the 1970s. (Pictured.)

Moreover, as recently as the late 1980s, the Russians were working on a space plane called MAKS that could be launched from the back of a six-engine Antonov airlifter. Some observers believe Ostapenko was referring to a revived MAKS in his oblique commentary last week.

Even if it got built and reached orbit, the new Russian space plane could find itself flying blind, Oberg warned. “Their [the Russians’] worldwide tracking net has dramatically shrunk and their space-based relay satellites broke down in the 1990s and haven’t been replaced, so real-time in-flight monitoring/control can be a problem.”

Plus, space planes are probably too expensive for the rickety Russian economy, Oberg added. “The most recent time that their government was conned into copying a winged spaceship ‘because the Americans have one,’ they bankrupted their space budget on a pointless dead end — the magnificent, maleficent ‘Buran.’” That’s the Soviet’s answer to our Space Shuttle. It flew exactly once.

Never mind the control and cost issues. According to Stanford-affiliated analyst Pavel Podvig, the major reason Moscow probably won’t go ahead with a new space plane is conceptual.

Space planes like the X-37B are highly versatile and their operational concepts necessarily a bit vague at this point. “You can put sensors in there, satellites in there,” Eric Sterner, from The Marshall Institute, said of the X-37. “You could stick munitions in there, provided they exist.” The Air Force is likely to discover more and more uses for the X-37 as it steadily increases the bot’s flying rate, from just one sortie last year to at least two in 2011.

For the Russian military, which doesn’t enjoy a $50-billion “black” budget like America does, that kind of ambiguity represents a political liability. “My understanding is that the [Russian] space industry has better luck getting support and financing for projects that have a more or less clearly defined goals,” Podvig said.

All the same, until Ostapenko or another official gives us more information on Russia’s orbital intentions, even Oberg and Podvig can only guess. One thing is clear: space planes will probably play a big role in future conflicts. The only question is: whose space planes?